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Monday, July 6, 2009

Book Contest- The Off Season

Acclaimed novelist Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel is a stunning tale of love and loss.

For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly--happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love over and over again, where their ghosts still dance. There, she looks hard to her past--to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety-- to try to figure out her future.

It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage.

Q&A WITH ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Q. Many of your previous novels have been set in the South. Why did you decide to set this novel in Maine? You live in Maine part of the year. What do you love about it?A. I love Maine with all my heart, and since my protagonist is a bit like me, I thought she would like Maine, too. There’s nothing I don’t love about it; there is a strength, clarity, and sparseness to it that I ache for sometimes – stuck as I am in the richest, hottest, most fertile part of the South, the Carolina low country.

Q. You create such wonderful, three-dimensional characters. Do you base your characters on real people or are they purely products of your imagination?A. There is always a flicker or a seeming of someone real in most of my characters, but by the time I have developed a character enough to carry them through a book, they become their own selves and there’s no doubt about that. I never knowingly copy anybody – I’m not that good at it.

Q. Lilly’s summers in Edgewater are a very important part of her childhood. Did you have a summer home or summer community similar to Lilly’s when you were growing up?A. Most of the summers of my childhood, we went to St. Simons or Sea Island in Georgia. We stayed in the same old cottages over and over again which gave me a sense that summer just ought to be about the same place – then it can have real magic.

Q. Off Season is in large part about Lilly’s relationship with her mother, Elizabeth. Many of your previous novels also examine the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. What do you find fascinating about such relationships?A. I don’t think a woman becomes a whole woman without enormous input from her mother. I don’t think it’s possible. Even if we become totally something else, we still stand on our mother’s shoulders.

Q. Much of this book is about Cam and Lilly’s marriage, but you don’t romanticize the institution of marriage. How do you understand Cam and Lilly’s marriage?A. I understand it first and foremost as a marriage of deep mutual need, but there is no doubt that their love is profoundly strong and enduring. I think it was Robert Frost who said, “only when love and need are one.”

Q. Like many of your other novels, this one takes place during the 1960s. What is it about this period of time that interests you?A. Well, it was my time. And I lived in the epicenter of the civil rights movement and was a reporter during that time. I knew Dr. King and his lieutenants and besides, it was a time that literally changed the world we knew into something else.

Q. Your novels are often about the lives of women. In an interview you once said, “Maybe it doesn’t happen so totally and drastically to most of us, but I haven't seen many women fall into middle age without losing something that has always been a very important part of their lives, and either having to make a life around that, or find a way to go on, or change in order to go on. It seems to me that women are left to do the changing and accommodating.” Do you still believe this to be true? Why does it fall on the woman to “do the changing and accommodating”?A. I believe in large part it is still true—it was, after all, Odysseus who sailed away and Penelope who stayed home and wove. And no matter what we say, and what great sentiments we have about women in the modern world, the vast majority of women I know are still left to do the accommodating and the changing. I think it is because it has always been so and we are a species very reluctant to change.

Q. The ending of Off Season is quite shocking. Without giving anything away, do you find it tragic or hopeful?A. I find it basically tragic, but I also find it oddly hopeful that Lilly takes such comfort in talking to her dead husband and her cat. I think that whatever we do to cope with such enormity is valid and hopeful.

Q. Can you describe your creative a process a bit? How do you go about developing your stories? Do you usually have an outline to work from before you begin writing? Do you go through many drafts and rewrites?A. For some reason, when I start out writing, I have a very clear picture of what the book should be from the beginning to end and what my characters should be. I don’t know where this comes from – perhaps a story I’ve heard, a person I’ve met, a situation I’ve observed – but something in me says, “wouldn’t that make a good book?” I don’t have an outline per se, but I do have a sense of trajectory for each character so I don’t have a bunch of people milling about on the page. I always know the ending. As for rewrites, no editor has ever asked me to do that.

Q. Lilly is a voracious reader and she finds comfort, knowledge, and escape through reading. She seems to particularly love myths and folklore. What were your favorite novels when you were growing up? Who are your favorite writers?A. I read so much, it’s hard for me to remember. I read my way through the Campbell County library, but mythology – Norse and Greek –was the very bones of my childhood. Growing up, one of my favorite writers was J.D. Salinger. I have so many favorites now. Pat Conroy never wrote a word that wasn’t magical to me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez will always be a favorite, and Edith Wharton and Henry James have been important to me for a long time.

Q. OFF SEASON is such a wonderful novel that it leaves the reader wanting more. Are you working on anything new at the moment?A. I always have three or four ideas in my head that I intend to make into novels one day. I have one I plan to begin in the fall that will be my second book for Grand Central Publishing. There will be more.

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